365.152 Amused by my Intense Frustration, a Self Portrait

365.152 Amused by my Intense Frustration, a Self Portrait

Some weeks ago, I submitted a photo of unfolded interior of a gallon-sized fishy cracker container and claimed that I would be making an on-camera macro flash diffuser out of it. This would be 365-95, if you’d like to reminisce.

Well, fast forward 57 days and guess where that former fishy-cracker container has been for all this time…

So I decided to spend a couple of hours doing what I said I was going to do, sort of.

5 or 6 hours and ~400 shots later, here we are.

First, I do quite like the light this mod gives off. It’s fairly warm, comes out in a tight, upside-down teardrop shape or in a narrow, open-topped strip, and is fairly well feathered, despite having very little in the way of modifications to it beyond opening the carton out flat and rolling one end around the SB-700 and temporarily fixing it with some gaff tape.

Second, the convertible nature of the mod itself makes me thing that it might be useful for something, somewhere, sometime, but who knows.

Third, the D7000 is incapable of setting separate focus settings for the ML-L3 remote… This means that I ended up having to remove the back-button focus, change to area mode, and cross my fingers that it would focus on my eyes and not my ears (which it decided to do if I was in any way out of center, even at f/8, and I had intended to use the shot for my about.me page, which would require a mostly off-center me to leave room for the about text and links… I’ll have to resort to photoshop after all: thanks, Nikon… though I probably could’ve used single-point af and just tried to make sure my eyes were close to the point I set, though I had very little success with that early on).

So out of ~400 shots, fully 250 were out of focus thanks to the flaky af, which—to be honest—never gave me any problems before, so it’s likely I was just doing something wrong. Another 130 or so had me looking particularly goofy, as I am wont to do in photos. And many of the remaining usable ones captured me in full-on rage mode, or looking rather vacant.

But this one worked, sort of, after I converted it to black and white and cloned out most of the frizzy hairs on the back of my head.

And I think I look rather nice here, even though I’m deep in the throes of I-want-to-smash-the-&%[email protected]$!-camera mode and taking a moment to chuckle at myself for getting so bothered by something of so little consequence, really.

tl;dr: this photo finds me amused at my frustration and trying to deep-breathe my way out of it.

In case you’re curious, here’s the fishy-cracker light mod in its current state:

The top section can flip up, which cuts the intensity by at least two stops, and adds a tiny bit of ceiling-bounce to the whole operation. I think it’ll be pretty cool when I get it all finally assembled, if I ever get it all finally assembled…